Ironies of Oneness and Difference

Brook Ziporyn

Description

Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rethinking Same and Different

Coherence and Li: Plan Method of This Book and Its Sequel

1. Essences, Universals, and Omnipresence: Absolute Sameness and Difference

Essences, Universals, Categories, Ideas: Simple Location and the Disjunction of Same and Different in in Mainstream Western Philosophy
Same and Different in Form Matter
Two Opposite Derivations of Omnipresent

2. What Is Coherence? Chinese Paradigms

Coherence As Opposed to Law, Rule, Principle,Pattern: Harmony Versus Repeatability
Is White Horse Horse?
Qian Mu’s Pendulum
Ironic and Non-Ironic Coherence

3. Non-Ironic Coherence and Negotiable Continuity

Coherence and Omniavailability of Value in Confucius and Mencius
Coherence and Heaven in Analects
Ritual Versus Law: Cultural Grammar
Rectification of Names: Negotiated Identity as a Function of Ritual
Classes and Types in Mencius
Omnipresence in Mencius
Transition to Ironic Coherence: Qi-Omnipresence and the Empty Center in Pre-Ironic Proto-Daoism

4. Ironic Coherence and the Discovery of the “Yin”

The Laozi Tradition: Desiring Wholes
Overview of Ironic Coherence in the Laozi
The Five Meanings of the Unhewn: Omnipresence and Ironic Coherence in the Laozi
Zhuangzi’s Wild Card: Thing as Perspective
Using the Wild Card
The Wild Card Against Both Objective Truth and Subjective Solipsism
Conclusion to Chapter 4: Ironic Coherence

5. Non-Ironic Responses to Ironic Coherence in Xunzi and the Record of Ritual

Xunzi and the Regulation of Sameness and Difference
Omnipresence and Coherence in Xunzi
Two Texts from the Record of Ritual (Liji): “The Great Learning,” and “The Doctrine of the Mean”

6. The Yin-Yang Compromise

Yin-Yang Theism in Dong Zhongshu: The Metastasis of Harmony Irony
An Alternate Yin-Yang Divination System: Yang Xiong’s Taixuanjing

Conclusion and Summary: Toward Li

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• East Asian religions

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438442907
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor

IRONIES OF ONENESS AND DIFFERENCE
Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li
BROOK ZIPORYN
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ziporyn, Brook, 1964–
Ironies of oneness and difference : coherence in early Chinese thought : prolegomena to the study of Li / Brook Ziporyn.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4289-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Li. 2. Philosophy, Chinese. 3. Truth—Coherence theory. I. Title.
B127.L5Z57 2012
181'.11—dc23
2011038254
1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was a long time in gestation, and the process by which it came to be was especially protracted and convoluted, which means it has been sucking the life out of an unusually large number of persons and institutions for an especially long time! The parasite now takes the opportunity to express its gratitude to its hosts.
First and foremost I want to thank my students. I mean this in the most general sense—students real and virtual—because I remain convinced that the only real point of doing academic work of this kind is for the sake of the next generation of scholars and thinkers. As for our colleagues, our friends, our peers, they are beyond hope! And we are beyond hope for them, which is, I suppose, just as it should be. We are set in our ways, we have deep investments, emotional and otherwise, in our conclusions; at a certain age our minds start to rattle along the same old tracks, it seems. So for me the only really meaningful audience for a work of this kind is the unknown future readers, the young, the curious, the undecided, the ones who are still exploring, who have not yet declared any specific allegiance, who are trying to get a general sense of where they stand, of what can be assumed, of what the possibilities are and what the cost and payoffs are for each of these options, of how things are and have been and could be.
Among my students in the flesh, I must single out Michael Beraka and Alanna Krause for their careful technical assistance with the manuscript. But I also owe an enormous debt to the discussions with and challenges posed by all my actual students over the years, which gave shape to the lectures from which this book emerged. And even more than that, it is the very existence of these students that is the real motivation behind trying to formulate and structure a global theory of this kind at all, to bother to try to express it in a consistent and intelligible form. Nietzsche, I think, got this point very right: “Whoever is fundamentally a teacher takes all things seriously only in relation to his students—including even himself.” So I owe them that too. Without them I would not have had the opportunity to experience that very strange but wholesomely unnatural form of consciousness: having to take oneself seriously now and then.
Looking in the other direction, at yin's debt to yang rather than yang's debt to yin, I must also thank the teachers who many years ago first really opened my eyes to the careful and systematic study of classical Chinese philosophy, above all Professor Donald Munro and Professor Xin Yiyun 辛意雲. The model derived from both of these exemplars in how to combine detail and overview, rigor and creativity, in a single integrated process, together with the specific insights and orientations gained in the careful study of many of the classical texts discussed in this book, continues to be my guiding lodestone, which I feel has served me enormously well over the years.
I have also had the good fortune to have many accomplished and distinguished specialists read versions of this manuscript in various stages of its growth, to whom I owe enormous gratitude both for the time and encouragement they have given me and the invaluable comments they have offered. Among the very eminent minds who have done me this honor I must first mention of course my simultaneous antipode and doppelgänger Alan Cole, who has long been for me a true knower of the tone (知音) both musically and intellectually. Nothing has been more sustaining and stimulating for my thinking than the eternal riddle posed by our interactions: How can such total agreement and total disagreement of outlook coincide so exactly and in such a convivial and invigorating way? That must mean something. But great gratitude is also owed on this score to my much admired friends Steven Angle, Roger Ames, Michael Puett, Franklin Perkins, Robin Wang, Alan Dagovitz (Levinovitz), Michelle Molina, and Paul D'Ambrosio, all of whom have lent me the benefits of their great erudition, intelligence, sensitivity, and time to read and comment on drafts of this book, thereby greatly improving it.
Great thanks are also due to Nancy Ellegate at State University of New York Press for seeing this complicated project through over the course of its many metamorphoses, and for the free hand she was willing to allow me to get it done; that was by any standard an unusually complicated process that required considerable steadiness of hand and of vision on her part, as well as a degree of confidence in the author's judgment that has become lamentably rare among editors, a confidence I fervently hope that I have deserved.
Over the years during which this book was written I have suckled at the teat of many an institution as well. The Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University have been my home for most of this time, and I have been treated exceptionally well there. It has also been my pleasure to be part of the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, where some of the final work on this book was done. Financial support has been generously provided by a fellowship awarded by the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, and from an International and Area Studies Grant sponsored jointly by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The official vote of confidence embodied therein, as well as the financial assistance, have been indispensable to the completion of this work.
Of course there are also many people to whom I owe gratitude on a more personal level, a lot of people whom I love a lot, maybe even including some already mentioned. I'm too shy, though, not to feel somewhat paralyzed and discomfited by the prospect of talking about this kind of emotional bond in public, making the customary front-of-the-book PDA feel almost like a slightly indecent act—shy, or perhaps self-protective, or perhaps just old-fashioned and easily embarrassed, or superstitious in a Rumpelstiltskinny way about naming names, lest this steal from their owners the power they have over me. They know who they are, don't they? Anyway: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen .
INTRODUCTION

子曰: 君子和而不同, 小人同而不和
The Master said, “The noble man is harmonious [with others] but not the same [as them]. The petty man is the same [as others] but not harmonious [with them].”
— Analects , 13:23
自其異者視之, 肝膽楚越也。自其同者視之, 萬物皆一也。
Looked at from [the viewpoint of] their differences, your own liver and gall bladder are Chu [to the south] and Yue [to the north]. Looked at from [the viewpoint of] their sameness, the ten thousand things are all one.
—Zhuangzi, “Dechongfu”
當知一切由心分別諸法。何曾自謂同異。
You must understand how everything derives from the mind's differentiation of things. For when do things themselves ever declare themselves to be “the same as” or “different from” one another?
—Jingxi Zhanran, Zhiguan yili
Let's suppose for a moment that “questioning our assumptions” is something worth doing—because it frees us from prejudices, because it expands our powers of thought and action, because it opens up new possibilities, because to do so is almost the definition of learning and thinking per se, because it is (as a result or perhaps synonym of all of the above) fun. One way to do this, no doubt, would be to undertake the serious and sympathetic examination of alternate belief systems, of other types of assumptions, ones that differ in surprising ways from the ones to which we ourselves, with whatever degree of self-reflective awareness, have been committed. Classical Chinese thought is often recommended in this connection, and rightly so. But the uncovering of alternate beliefs about “what is so”—how the world might happen to be, how human beings might be constituted, and so on—is perhaps less unsettling, and hence potentially less salutary, than the contemplation of alternate possibilities for what constitutes a belief , for what is intended in saying that anything is “so,” or for the preconditions that are unconsciously assumed in even formulating the choice between alternative beliefs. To entertain an alternative view about what things exists o